No Place for Heroes

34

“SHE’S VERY PRETTY, Andrea Robles,” Mateo told his mother that night. “An elongated face, thin body, curly hair, and eyes like this. She took me to the Botanical Gardens, which was full of cats, but there we talked. Who knows what all those cats in the gardens eat, Lolé. You think people bring them food? Or maybe the government feeds them. Or they eat plants, botanical stuff, like cows do. It’s not just a few, there’s an army of cats. I’ve never seen so many in my life. That is not a botanical garden, it’s a feline garden.

“She’s older than me, Andrea Robles. Like four years, or ten. At least six, yes six, or seven, that’s what I figured, although she sometimes seems like she could be my age, depending on how you look at her, and she talks about revolution, about commitments, about the injustices of this world. Andrea believes in those things, Lolé; she says she inherited it from her father. She told me that for many years she thought he had died in a car accident, that’s what they’d told her, her mother I guess, since it sounds like the loving lie of a mother. A lie from a mother afraid that in school her daughter would repeat the true story and get the whole family in trouble.

“In their house, there had always been mystery surrounding the work of her father,” Mateo went on. “I mean, even when el negro Robles was still alive, they had this problem. Can you imagine? When they asked Andrea what her father did, she didn’t know how to reply, so she started making up jobs for him, inspired by things she saw around the house. She always saw papers, piles of papers, typewriters, mimeograph machines, and that’s why she started to tell everyone that her father was an office worker. Or if not that, a pilot, because they always traveled for free. Of course, in truth it wasn’t free, the tickets were bought by the party, but she didn’t know that. What she knew was that airlines gave pilots and their families free tickets, so she decided that her father was a pilot. She also said that he was in the military, or so she told me, that she told people her father was in the military, or was a militant. Funny, right, Lolé? The two things sounded the same to Andrea Robles, the military and militant. She had heard both words in her house and she thought they were the same thing.

“Andrea Robles told me that one morning around seven they were having breakfast as always, and some friends of her mother arrived, who were not really friends but party comrades, but Andrea did not know that until much later. Her mother attended to them in the kitchen. Andrea did not know what they were doing there so early, and they wouldn’t leave to let them have their breakfast, and when they finally did leave, her mother sat her and her brother at the table, but instead of giving them breakfast, she told them that their father had died in an accident.

“It had already been some time since Andrea Robles’s father had separated from her mother and gone to live in another city, so that Andrea did not see him that much anyway, not every day, not even every month, only once in a while. So that when he was killed, Andrea didn’t feel the change much, and pretty soon forgot about the fact that he was dead and returned to the idea that he lived far away and that he would soon come to visit. When he had been alive, el negro Robles visited them and took them on trips to the mountains in his Citroën, where they would make snowmen. I asked Andrea if that mountain was in Bariloche, and I told her that Forcás had taken me to see the snow in Bariloche, but what I didn’t tell her was that he only took me once and then disappeared. She told me that it wasn’t in Bariloche, but some mountain. What mountain? I don’t know, Lorenza, I don’t know what mountain, we didn’t get into details. Andrea told me that it was the only time in her life that she’d seen snow, never again after that, even after she became an adult. Now that I think about it, el negro César took his kids to see the snow only once, like Ramón did with me. It’s an important part of the story. And they were lucky because it snowed. Well, maybe he took his kids to the mountains several times, but it only snowed that one time.

“What I want to tell you about is that Andrea thought that her father’s accident had been in the Citroën, and that a few days afterward had been very surprised when she saw the Citroën in perfect condition, not even a scratch on it. How was it possible that her father had died in the Citroën, and not a thing had happened to the car? But she didn’t ask. Not at all. She said she didn’t ask anything, didn’t think anything, didn’t come to any conclusions. Only later would she find out that he had been gunned down, and that the Citroën had nothing to do with it.

“Now Andrea knows exactly how everything happened and has filed a legal case against the murderers and she has to testify and give statements. But as a girl she knew nothing. She says that the death of her father seemed unreal because she was only eight when they killed him. She didn’t understand what it meant to die, no one near her had ever died, and on top of that, during the funeral the coffin was closed and she never even suspected that he was in there.

“Andrea told me that she had loved him very much, and that her father had loved her in the same way. I asked her how she knew this, that is, how she was so sure that el negro Robles had loved her, and she said that he always brought her little presents, postcards and maps of the world. And some castanets. Andrea still had those castanets that el negro Robles had brought her once, surely from Spain. But she also knew that he loved her because when she was born, her father ran out and bought all the books by Piaget to understand what children were like and how to best educate them. Tell me, Lolé, did Ramón read all the books by Piaget after I was born, because if he did, they didn’t do him much good.

“One day, Andrea had invited her father to a cafeteria to have a coffee. She told me that she was very small and that she had never in her life had a coffee because it probably tasted terrible, but because she saw el negro talking in cafés with his friends and they all drank coffee, she had wanted to do the same, and she tore into a long monologue on why he had to return to live with her mother.

“In any case, after they killed her father, Andrea Robles began to miss him like never before, that’s what she told me. So she started to pretend that he wasn’t dead but was traveling in Europe and that he would bring her back postcards and castanets. She also liked to imagine that he had lost his memory, a blow to the head or something like that, and since he didn’t remember anything, he couldn’t look for her or call her. It was funny when Andrea told me that, Lolé, because once I also relied on that story that Ramón had lost his memory. I asked Andrea Robles if she ever imagined that her father had been imprisoned, and now it was her turn to laugh, probably because she had thought up that excuse as well.

“Andrea Robles continued to make up stories for herself until one day she picked up the newspaper and saw a picture of her father riddled with bullets. It was on the anniversary of his death, or something like that. Andrea said that it had been a horrible blow, although she was already eighteen, a horrible blow to see the picture of your own father’s body riddled with bullets. Imagine that, Lolé, it must have been quite the surprise. Of course it helped her, what I mean is that, in the end, finding that picture was a good thing for Andrea Robles, because it forced her to finally accept the fact that el negro Robles had died. And she also realized that he had been a brave man and that he had died fighting against injustices and for the poor, and she became such a fan of her father that now she wants to emulate him in everything. But what about that photo? He was bullet-ridden, Lolé, how fucking crazy, to all of a sudden come upon a picture of your own father riddled with bullets. Did I tell her I was named César in honor of her father? No, but I think she already knew.”